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The Introduction to .NET E-Сommerce Development Services. Part 1

Karl Gorman

November

2024

The Introduction to .NET E-Сommerce Development Services. Part 1

.NET e-commerce development tools are essential for creating online shopping platforms that enable businesses to sell their products and services. It helps consumers reach and use those products. Companies can easily reach their target audience. There are also no duration limits since products and services are available 24/7.

Introduction

What is .NET?

As a cross-platform open-source development framework, .NET offers a comprehensive toolkit for building applications. Leveraging various programming languages, developers can build different software solutions, including mobile, web, desktop, and cloud-native solutions. With its compatibility across Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems, .NET provides efficiency for modern software development. The .NET framework is the original version but only runs on Windows computers. With the acquisition of .NET, you obtain a variety of programs that can translate your code into language the computer understands, offer tools for software development, and provide a structured framework for data storage using intuitive data types for text, numbers, dates, and more.

Why Choose .NET for E-commerce Development?

.NET offers a platform that develops reliable and scalable e-commerce solutions. A number of characteristics make .NET an appropriate tool for e-commerce websites:

Security

This is an important component in every e-commerce application. .NET offers safe platforms based on the Windows operating system with functionalities such as validation and verification control and code access security. Its APIs protect data integrity and confidentiality for secure communication.

Scalability

.NET applications can expand horizontally by adding more servers to share the platform load. E-commerce businesses can grow without being concerned about technological problems because they can handle high customer demand.

System performance

This tool supports asynchronous programming and parallel execution to improve application performance. This enables e-commerce applications to manage several user requests at once.

Understanding E-commerce Basics

Key Components of an E-commerce Platform

User-Friendly Interface

The place where buyers are likely to come across a brand or its product is an e-commerce platform. A website with a user-friendly interface will enable visitors to interact well when they surf the business page. When building an e-commerce application, the users are the priority. Hence, it is important to ensure that users can easily access the platform by making its design responsive to support its display on different types of devices.

Integration capabilities.

Some third-party applications, such as email marketing tools and inventory management systems, can be integrated into e-commerce .NET e-commerce platform development in order to improve performance operations. This type of connection minimizes repetitive chores and increases business productivity.

Analytics and Reporting

Data-driven decision-making is an important strategy for optimizing an e-commerce application. Detailed analytics and reporting provide information concerning consumer behavior, market trends, and the effectiveness of adverts. These characteristics will help give detailed business reports and indicators to drive growth.

Common Features in Modern E-commerce Websites

Customer service

Offering useful, readily available customer service is an important aspect of establishing a good experience for customers. Include a 24-hour customer assistant chatbot as part of an e-commerce platform feature to meet consumers’ needs at any point in time.

Various payment option

A common issue for online businesses is users abandoning shopping carts. Hence, to increase the chances of completing a purchase process at the last phase of checkout on the platform, it is good to make the purchase procedure simple for the client by adding numerous methods of payment online in the shopping cart, including payment providers such as Paypal, Stripe, debit, and credit cards.

Mobile-friendly feature

Consumers who shop online rely more on mobile devices in today’s market. Online businesses are explored more on mobile phones. Hence, mobile optimization is vital for an e-commerce website design. Such platforms should conform to any device screen size to aid conversion rate and satisfy customers.

User Experience and Design Considerations

Collection pages

Organizing products into understandable groups improves e-commerce platform navigation and encourages users to surf the site more. A collection page filter will enable customers to easily switch pages at any time. Product cards should have limited details and clear typography in order to reduce cognitive overload.

Navigation

When a .NET e-commerce website has good navigation, users have a better experience conversion rate, search engine optimization improves, and visitors can easily find new products. A good navigation system will direct users across the site, with clear and understandable categories and a typography that supports accessibility and is legible for the target audience. This should be consistent, allowing users to access the site from any point.

Product pages

These pages are the core of e-commerce applications because they express what a product looks like and persuade customers to purchase items. It should be clear and detailed with information about each product. When items are viewed from several angles, they should be displayed in good quality.

.NET Framework and E-commerce

Overview of .NET Technologies

The .NET is used to build scalable and high-performance applications. It depends on the Common Language Runtime. This handles the execution of .NET software programs, which includes exception handling, memory management, and security. C# is the core programming language that powers the .NET system. Its cross-platform ability and libraries can be used to develop applications that will function on multiple platforms and devices. It offers developers various tools and supports different phases of a software development cycle. Some of these include:

NuGet

This is a .NET package manager that enables handling third-party libraries and frameworks within a project. It offers a large collection of packages, helping developers include library dependencies in applications. It automates the handling of packages and ensures that dependencies are properly resolved.

.NET software development kit (SDK)

This is a collection of tools that are designed to assist developers in creating, testing, and deploying .NET applications. It comprises all the elements required to develop .NET e-commerce software, such as compilers, runtime libraries, and command-line tools. The .NET software development kit is required to compile and configure the development environment.

NUnit and MStest

The .NET Unit and Microsoft test are testing frameworks in the .NET environment for unit and automated testing. The frameworks offer tools and assertions to create and execute tests. Developers can inspect the validity and reliability of their codes, uncover flaws in the early process of development, and promote the test-driven development process.

ASP.NET Core for Web Applications

This is an open-source web development framework intended for developing modern cloud-based applications. It is a high-performance tool with cross-platform compatibility. It can operate on macOS, Linux, and Windows. Key features of the ASP.NET Core:

Enhanced performance because of a new modular architecture that enables better caching and optimization.
An easy development process using a unified framework that integrates model view controller (MVC) design pattern and web API into one pipeline.
Better development of page-focused applications using the Razor pages programming model.

Entity Framework for Data Management

Data management is the basis of any program. Entity framework serves as a foundation for effective data management. Entity Framework makes operation in a database easy, improves development, and ensures performance and scalability. Some of the significance of data management and the function of entity framework are:

Model-driven development: The entity framework enables developers to build data models using typical C# classes called entity classes. Using this procedure, developers can spend less time during development because they do not need to use manual SQL queries to create a database. Hence, they are able to focus on building the business logic instead of database details.
CRUD operation: Entity framework makes database procedures such as creating, reading, updating, and deleting (CRUD) an easy task by enabling the querying and manipulation of data using Language-integrated query. Instead of manually writing complicated SQL statements, developers can obtain and manage data using detailed Language-integrated queries.
Automatic migration: The entity framework code automates schema development and database migration according to the modification in the data model. This method ensures that the deployment of the database and the schema and application code are all in synchronization, minimizing errors and irregularities.

Security Best Practices with .NET

SQL injection prevention

To prevent malicious attacks on a database that result in the breaching of sensitive data, it is important to enhance application security by implementing measures leveraging structured query techniques (for example, stored procedures, parameterized queries, or object-relational mappers – a programming technique that help connect object-oriented languages such as C# with relational databases). Also, security can be maintained by restricting database access, rigorously validating user input, and encrypting sensitive data. This protects an application from dangers associated with SQL injection, data breaches, and authorized access.

Cross-site Request forgery

This type of malicious attack is carried out by building a forged site that appears to be a reliable source and then infiltrating a legitimate platform via an established user session. To avoid this, utilize AntiFogeryToken as an attribute in HTML and change its value to true, as it is false by default. When this is changed to true, the anti-forgery token is generated, and it inserts the [ValidateAntiForgeryToken] property to the post-action of the form function to ensure that the token was created.

Perform penetration testing

It is important to implement penetration testing to uncover flaws and document the outcome so that this will help as a basis for security checks and references for determining the failure that led to the breach. For various stages in the development process, penetration testing eliminates complexity and confirms the protection of an application.

Building Your E-commerce Store with .NET

Setting Up the Development Environment

To build a .NET e-commerce platform, it is important to take note of the requirements for the development setup, which include:

A supported development environment type: this is divided into cloud-based and local environments.

A cloud-based development environment is deployed using the Microsoft Dynamics lifecycle service.
The local has two options for setting up a development environment on your machine. The self-hosted class, structure, union (CSU) – this is like a mocking environment because there is no data synchronization; the database consists of demo data for development purposes. The Internet Information Service CSU – this supports a real-time connection of the platform database to enable Custom .NET e-commerce development.

The following are the prerequisites needed for setting up the local development environment:

Install .NET software development kit
Install ASP.NET Core runtime
Install any edition of the SQL server and enable full-text search
Install the NuGet package manager executable file
If MSbuild does not already exist on your machine, install the Visual Studio tool
Install Microsoft.NET.Sdk using the previously downloaded Visual Studio tool
Install the 64-bit version of Nodejs
Install the 64-bit version of Visual Studio Code
Install the C# for Visual Studio Code
Clone or download the scale unit GitHub repository

Implementing Shopping Cart Functionality

A .NET shopping cart development has the following components to aid the easy use of an e-commerce platform for visitors. These elements include:

A shopping cart class: This is created to store items in the shopping cart and functions to maneuver those items.
CartItem and product classes: A cartItem class is used to store information about each item in the shopping cart. The product class helps to grab the data bout those items.
Add item to class: This enables the addition of items to the cart and redirects users so they can see the item they added.

Integrating Payment Gateways

For online retailers to be able to make transactions, a payment gateway is needed in a .NET e-commerce website solution. It is the checkout passageways where card information can be submitted for a complete process. This procedure involves the following:

Set up a Braintree account, which enables a secure payment process in the e-commerce application, providing options for various payment methods such as credit, debit cards, and digital wallets.
Set up the development environment and Install all necessary packages.
Generate client tokens and card payment information. The token contains all the information for the client software development kit. Store the data generated in a model so that the details can be easily accessed in order to process a payment.

Managing Orders and Inventory

Order and inventory management are important in developing an e-commerce application. Order management has an order entity and processing, while the inventory involves the inventory entity and control.
Order entity:

Core information: This is the details about the customer, the ID of the order, as well as the shipping, and billing address.
Order item: this is the collection of items, each connecting to a specific product
Order status: this shows if an order has been processed or is pending.

Order processing:

Checkout: as soon as a customer completes a checkout process, an order is created.
Payment processing: integration with payment gateways for secure processes
Shipping: generate shipping labels and update the status of orders.

Inventory entity:

Core information: this includes the supplier information, level of stock, product id, etc.
Real-time inventory updates: this helps to keep inventory level updated.
Low-stock alert: a method that is implemented to notify the administrator as soon as the inventory level is low.

Inventory control: